---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 125. In the context of this part of the Bill, I have a good deal of sympathy with the Government’s idea that this should be a non-judicial process. After all, if a subscriber loses, they get tipped into a judicial process in the civil courts. It does not, in this part of the Bill, impose too great a burden on the subscriber to have this as a relatively informal process. However, in the same structure—if the noble Lord wishes, I will table additional amendments later in the Bill—we are looking at what happens if we get into technical measures. Then, the consequences of losing under the appeal arrangements are that you are likely to have your internet connection severed or greatly reduced, which can be an extreme penalty if you run a business from home, as many people do. The process begs to have a properly constituted appeal and indeed a route to pursue beyond that. We will come back to technical measures. They are quite loosely defined and can have a big impact on a person. If we are talking about taking technical measures against someone who is providing a number of people with their internet connections and who has fallen foul of the process, there can be a knock-on effect. Under those circumstances, the decision should be properly taken, with a clear route of appeal. I come back to my fondness for another Bill that the Government took through not so long ago, which became the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act. It set up and regulated tribunals so that they became easier to understand and to deal with. Now they function well in many aspects of our society, and consider school appeals, appeals about special educational needs, tenancy disputes and appeals in many other areas. It is an established way of dealing with disputes where the consequence of losing the appeal is substantial. We should offer a potentially very large number of our citizens proper access to justice before we tip them into something like the technical measures that are envisaged in the Bill. The Minister has persuaded me that the second part of Amendment 125 is inappropriate. There should be a cost to appeal, otherwise everyone will do it and the system will get clogged up. It should be flexibly designed to ensure that the level of appealing is rational. That the appeal mechanism should be just and properly set up is something that we should all aim for. I hope that, if I cannot persuade the Minister, I will be able to persuade my Front Bench of that and come back to it on Report. I am not at all encouraged by the Minister’s reply to the earlier amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on the subject of the make-up of this body. If I am accused of doing something by a copyright owner and I find that the quasi-tribunal that I come up against has that copyright owner among its constitution, I am not going to be comforted by the idea that only two out of seven on the constituted tribunal come from that end. I am going to be comforted only if there is proper independence. As I said, this is something that we provide in the context of schools and in many other contexts. Those who are directly affected by the matter in hand are kept clear of the people who take the decision in the appeals process. I really do not think that we should step down from that level of justice just because we are dealing with our children rather than ourselves. I beg to move.